on life, theory, buddhism, sustainability, and other miscellany

Stasis or Kinesis

“The world is in a state of flux,” said Heraclitus. His contemporary Parmenides said the exact opposite – “everything is unitary and static”.

While it is easy to show that something that looks stable is in fact changing it is hard to show that it is not. One can say that both are illusions, only that one eventually does show itself to be the case (kinesis). Over time an object in rest gradually changes its form. What Parmenides was arguing for was that this was all an illusion and that really everything is the same. In other words, he was a kind of rationalist.

In some ways Christians are rationalists, that sense empirical data is imperfect and should be ignored.

Priority and preference is given to the thinking mind rather than to the physical reality. Rationalists will argue that all that is necessary is the mind and its reason.

But if that is the case why have we not evolved to be rid of sensory faculties. Clearly, the senses do matter, and it is to sense the changes in the environment, not its staticity. Stasis is a controlled look at all things. There is something abstract about stasis, it’s removal of movement of reality, like a photographic still or a painting of a scene.

Links

Events

International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust27 January 2019

World Day of Social Justice20 February 2019

International Mother Language Day21 February 2019

International Women’s Day8 March 2019

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination21 March 2019

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